The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [5]
The peddler Eli Willard was not in the business of purveying livestock; he just happened to have the two lambs this trip around, which actually was devoted to the selling of musical instruments, everything from parlor organs to Jew’s harps. For thirty-five cents Nail also bought from him a harmonica, a fitting accompaniment to sheep-raising. It was an M. Hohner Marine Band Tremolo Echo, and Nail taught himself how to make it tremble and to make it echo, when he wasn’t too busy teaching himself how to keep Cotswolds happy and healthy and reproductive. The trials and errors of this operation, had they been known to the other people of Stay More, would have made for all the jokes anyone would ever want to tell on Nail Chism, but he suffered his self-education in absolute privacy, and he practiced “Fisher’s Hornpipe” and “Billy in the Low Ground” and “Sook Pied, Sook Pied, Come an’ Git Yore Nubbins,” in complete seclusion from any ears except those of his sheep, who seemed to appreciate him and would sometimes blaat along.
What did he look like? He was very tall, the loftiest of the Chism brothers, at six feet three inches, and muscular without seeming strong, with a shock of very light brown hair, not quite blond as the newspapers would describe it, stuck up in what folks chose to call his sheeplick. He had blue eyes. The Arkansas Gazette’s drawing of him in December of 1914, by their staff artist Viridis Monday, does not fairly represent him, with that head shaved of its prematurely whitening locks (he was not yet twenty-eight) and that splendid physique looking frail beneath its prison clothes. Only the eyes in the Monday drawing seem to be the Nail Chism that most of us remembered: pale, gentle, comical, inquisitive, curious, and brighter-than-you’d-like-to-think: certainly not the eyes of a man on his way to the electric chair. Nail Chism was nobody’s fool. And yet there were those who liked to think that he was everybody’s fool.
One of those was his brother-in-law Sewell Jerram, of Jasper, the county seat, some ten miles north of Stay More. Sewell, or Sull as everybody but his mother pronounced it, had been born in Stay More but thought of himself as a town boy, although Jasper back then was already what it still is: the smallest county seat in the state of Arkansas, with just a few hundred people, and being a town boy in a small village didn’t leave Sull Jerram conspicuously different from a country boy; an outsider from, say, Little Rock wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart. But Sull Jerram didn’t know anything about farming, and the three brothers of Irene Chism, when Sull was courting her, got considerable amusement out of observing Sull’s ignorance of country ways and customs.
Irene Chism was but a half-sister to Nail and his two brothers. Her mother, and senior by only fifteen years, was Nancy Nail Coe, whose father Jethro Nail, one of the first settlers of Newton County, had married a Choctaw Indian girl, making Nancy Nail a half-breed, and thus Irene and her brothers Waymon, Nail, and Luther were quarter-breed Indian, although the only thing about Viridis Monday’s portrait of Nail to indicate such Indian ancestry is his somewhat long nose and his intense but blue eyes beneath their heavy, crowding eyebrows.
Nancy Nail had been taken to wife at the age of just fourteen by a Stay Moron named Columbus Coe, but she had been widowed at the age of sixteen, when Irene was an infant, and had inherited a homestead of eighty acres northeast of Stay More, which she was determined to manage on her own and succeeded in running—cornpatch, pigpen, cowlot, and orchard—for nearly a year before asking her neighbor, Seth Chism, for a little